It is said that the best champagne is made from grapes grown upon land that has been cultivated for ages. A similar statement might be made in regard to lyric poetry. The greatest lyric poets of the world, they who represent it at its purest and best, Heine, Hafiz, Tu Fu, and Anacreon, represent the oldest races of Asia. Each is rich with the memory of a past that is glorious in achievement as history tells us, and remains among great traditions today. Not one was of the Christian race. In their veins there was either the blood of oriental Asia, or, as in the case of Anacreon, its tradition, having been born in Teos, one of the voluptuous Ionian cities of Asia Minor. Time was needed for ripening and perfecting of the races that bore them, because great poets are not born of unripe races. Their blood must be tempered by time. Slow centuries intervened between them. Anacreon lived somewhere in the neighborhood of five hundred years before Christ; Hafiz about thirteen hundred years after Christ. The exact date is uncertain. It is known, however, that in the year 1389, according to our reckoning of time, he was living in his beloved Shiraz, where he died and that at that time he was very old. Tu Fu lived in Eighth Century China, under Emperors of Tang. And Heine lived well on into the nineteenth century of our own day. The age of each was made turbulent and restless by great conquerors. Each knew the domination of warriors whose armies shook the earth. Anacreon knew the devastating wars of Cyrus the Great; Hafiz, the brutal Tamerlane who was the scourge of God, and who made towers of human heads to rival in height the tower of Babel; Tu Fu saw Turkish rebels destroy Ch’ang-an, one of earth’s loveliest dream-cities; and Heine was born on the very day that Napoleon was made First Consul of France. The best source of information concerning them is their words, although the outward facts of Heine’s life are told accurately enough by history, and a literature has grown up about his art. Few definite facts remain of Anacreon or Hafiz. Old Chinese writers tell us of Tu Fu with eloquence, with emotion. We do know, however, that each saw the splendid historical panorama of a world in transition unroll before his eyes; and that each saw the dominant forces in action that resulted in making the world of today. None has been circumscribed by the age in which he lived because his appeal has been universal, to humanity, whose heart beats responsively under chlamys of caftan. The lyrics of Tu Fu are as fresh and readable as if they had been written yesterday.